Ah yes, the Smart Car. The microcar with big intentions, that’s served as comedic fodder for every red-blooded, car-loving American since being introduced in the states in the mid-2000’s. The car that’s as far from high performance as you could possibly get in a vehicle. That is, unless you’re as creative as Illinois native Paul Barnes.
We’ll stop short of officially calling this the world’s quickest and fastest Smart Car to maintain journalistic accuracy, as somewhere in a far, distant land, another ingenious racer may have a jet engine stuffed into the um, trunk, of one of these print-sized cars, but as far as wheel-driven numbers go, to our knowledge, this one leads the way.
Barnes, a machine shop owner, has outfitted his Smart FourTwo with a 1.5L Toyota Tercel 5EFE engine and transmission setup, with a Sprintex supercharger pushing 28 pounds of boost into the 500 cfm carburetor through an intercooler. Barness accomplished this feat in the incredibly small real estate that the Smart Car affords by removing the stock engine and building a box over the rear of the car to fit the physically larger engine.
As Barnes shared with us, he has a wastegate actuator plumbed in that pulls the secondaries open at 10 psi, thus allowing the car to get rolling off the starting line without forcing too much fuel into the engine. An MSD 8-cylinder distributor is part of the equation, with every other post installed using a custom housing fabricated at Barnes’ machine shop.
It all adds up to a potent 207 horsepower on a chassis dyno, which is nearly three times the grunt these cars come with from the factory.
With a 30-70 front-to-rear weight bias, the engine in the tail of the car, and a rear wheel drive configuration, traction is not an issue for Barnes. This helps propel the car to quarter-mile elapsed times in the high 12’s at it’s rolling weight of 2,215 pounds, which we witnessed it crack off last weekend at the NMCA World Street Finals in Indianapolis, where it got the attention of pretty well everyone that saw it.
If that’s not enough, Barnes told us of his plan to plumb in a small shot of nitrous oxide for next season, so look for bigger and better things out of this mighty little ride.
While it’s still a far cry from the muscle cars and all-out racing machines we’re all accustomed to, this is certainly the coolest Smart Car we’ve ever see, bar-none.